Customer Success As A Career
If you are anything like me, “let’s see where this goes” is not in my relationship vocabulary as well as my career vocabulary. I like to know what lies ahead before embarking on a journey. It is for this same reason I always skip to the end of any movie that is trying to give me premature heart attack.
As an introvert, I had never considered a career in customer success a good fit mostly out of ignorance because all I knew or thought it was about was that I would have to talk to and smile at customers. Those were and still are two of my least favorite things to do. But thankfully, there's more to customer success than talks and smiles.
The Main Aspect of Customer Success Career
Job description
While the customer success role is oftentimes confused with roles such as Account Managers and Customer Support most especially in companies where the roles are not clearly defined. The main responsibilities however revolve around;
Onboarding: This involves getting the new customers onboarded and hooked (the good kind) on the business and its products and services as quickly as possible. This includes but not limited to account configuration, data importation and verification, training users on how to efficiently utilise products and services.
Onboarding is very essential in a customers journey and to customers experience and it is important that it be done rightly.
Education: During a customer’s journey, it is the responsibility of the customer success representative to educate the customer on how best to use the products and services available, inform them of new features and integration, and enlighten them on the offers and benefits. This education can be carried out via phone calls, emails, blog posts, newsletters, how-to contents and seminars or webinars.
Customer Retention: Customer retention is the catalyst that initiated the customer success role as a job. Simply put, as a customer success representative, this is why you are in business. You have to proactively and continuously analyse every aspect of a customer’s journey and experience, identify and eliminate all possible causes of churn and optimise factors that lead to customer retention.
This is a customer focused role and it plays a huge role in determining the success of a business. Working in customer success is not easy but it is a rewarding role.
My best moments are when I see significant improvement in company growth as a result of my direct effort. My head does swell a bit… Okay maybe a lot.
Cheers,
Seun